A paper presented at annual convention of National Council of Teachers of English (60th, Atlanta, November 27, 1970.) (Editor)

This study had two aims: (1) to determine whether there were significant differences in the syntax of college freshmen compositions of different overall quality, and (2) to determine whether certain syntactic indexes of writing maturity functioned as indexes of the quality of freshman writing. Two writing samples were elicited from 99 freshmen at…

Modern transformational grammars can be effective tools for writing, for they offer hypotheses and generalizations about English sentences which can be used in an infinite number of linguistic contexts. One writing skill which transformational grammars can help students achieve is the ability to choose between synonymous expressions. Some…

After considering the implications of the back-to-the-basics movement, the author concludes that there is little value in going "back" to approaches such as those typical of traditional grammar instruction. Instead, he suggests that sentence combining offers a basic approach to the teaching of writing. An experiment which began with four classes…

Combining concepts of cognitive theory with those of rhetoric and linguistics can help writing teachers understand the kinds of activities that will enable basic writers to produce syntactic constructions appropriate for the content they have generated. A review of research studies of sentence combining, syntactic constructions, grammatical…

This research project was designed to analyze by quantitative methods a corpus of writing produced by four groups of American college students enrolled in German courses and by one group of professional German writers. Analysis was undertaken in order to determine whether or not significant quantitative differences in the use of selected syntactic…

This monograph reports a longitudinal study of the language development of 211 pupils as they progressed from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Data include transcribed interviews, written compositions, reading and IQ scores, listening scores and ratings, teachers' ratings on specified language factors, and reports of books read. Results…

Samples of written language were collected from 140 congenitally deaf children at grade levels 3, 5, 7, and 9. The samples were then subjected to error, quantitative, and transformational analysis. Findings suggested a relationship between the order in which the deaf child acquires the rules of his language and the ordering of rules in a…

This study sought to broaden the scope of teacher training in English by incorporating an experimental design in practice teaching. The control group, 20 ninth graders whose IQ's averaged 95, studied narrative-descriptive writing and transformational grammar, writing the same number of compositions as the two experimental groups. The low…

When ninth-grade students are searching for help in expressing their newly discovered ideas, the principles of transformational grammar can be brought to their aid in the following ways: (1) Assign a provocative topic to the students which they are to discuss as fully as possible in one sentence. (2) Present only the kernel sentences of a…

The complex nature of grammar and its relevance to teaching today are explored in the light of modern linguistics. Reviewing the development and fundamental theory of transformational generative grammar, the author points out its substantial merit and also its failure to be understood as exemplary grammatical analysis of language rather than…

THE PURPOSE OF THIS STUDY WAS TO COMPARE SENTENCE-COMBINING TECHNIQUES OF PUPILS USING THE INITIAL TEACHING ALPHABET (I.T.A.) WITH THE TECHNIQUES OF PUPILS USING TRADITIONAL ORTHOGRAPHY (T.O.). THE INVESTIGATION CONSIDERED--(1) WHETHER I.T.A. PROVIDES A LINGUISTIC ADVANTAGE IN THE WAY PUPILS ADD GRAMMATICALLY TO THEIR SENTENCES, (2) WHETHER THERE…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 12 titles deal with the following topics: a transformational analysis of syntax in tenth-grade writing; the relationship between inner-city fifth graders' reading comprehension and writing achievement; the relationship of the…